Luke Skywalker Swings His Saber Above a Forest Walker — Print & Oil Painting

A wide panoramic canvas looking down into a forest from somewhere up in the canopy. Almost the entire frame is vegetation: layered green undergrowth, ferns, moss over stone, and one enormous rust-brown trunk holding the left edge. The eye has to work to find the two things in it that are not plants.

The first is the machine. An Imperial walker moves through the lower centre-right, seen from above and behind, its long hull weathered from grey to brown and dull ochre, panel lines and hatches picked out along the back, four legs planted among the roots and the head lowered ahead of it. From this angle it is not towering. It is a large animal pushing through undergrowth that comes up to its knees.

The second is a small figure in the upper left, airborne, arms above the head, a green blade extended in a full downward swing. He occupies perhaps a fiftieth of the canvas. That single stroke of green is the one saturated mark on the whole canvas, and it has been placed high and left so the composition runs on a long diagonal from it down to the walker's spine.

The light does quiet work. It arrives from behind and above, so the canopy glows where the leaves are thin while the machine sits in shade, and a few narrow shafts fall across the hillside between the two figures. There is grey plating at both bottom corners, a low bunker on one side and more structure on the other, left half-read and adding up only to the fact that this forest is occupied.

Our Star Wars collection puts this walker against the same match-up staged on snow and one abandoned in long grass.